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Collapsological discourses are approached at three discursive levels: that of their edition and of the controversies which form the suporters of this movement into a community of thought, that of the pragmatic implications of the appeal to fear which calls into question the capacity of individuals to act and finally that of the language practices that fully engage speakers in a cognitive revolution that institutions are slow to take into account despite the declared urgency.

This study questions the conditions of manifestation of the modalization process as an active force within the tensivity of filmic discourse. The hypothesis is made that the filmic image has a tensive consistency that we will call contexture, developing like a kind of fabric over the phenomenological duration of the shot and at the intersection of several parameters. Modalization is then manifested as a choice as to these parameters, making recognizable the distance between the enunciative instance and the utterance. On the other hand, the enunciative instance is to be found in an interlacing of relations with the other instances and we are led to notice that the cleavage of the modalization as to the enunciation process and as to the utterance gives rise to relationships rich in nuances and serves as a resource for the modalization process in the movie. Three issues stand out in the study: i) the modalization manifesting itself under the guise of enunciative erasure, ii) the cleavage in the modalization on two levels: that of the enunciation and of the utterance, and that of their reports, and iii) the way in which the modalizing competence of the enunciative instance exposes itself to heteronomous modalizing devices, such as programming discourse, intertext and the hollow modalization which is an accumulation of the absence of modal charges. The modalizing competence turns out to be able to re-expose, retouch or redefine the axiologies of values installed on all levels of the generative trajectory. Thus, the distribution of the modal charges functions as a problematization of axiological conversions emerging from the deep level. Finally, the modalization is constituted in a discrete but invigorating dimension of the life of the discourse.

This article seeks to use the analysis of “impersonal enunciation” in cinema to develop paths toward the question of ethics in film. First are presented some elementary aspects of film as a phenomenon of communication. Secondly, we submit the existence of an “impersonal” or “spectral” ethics in the film taken as a text. Communication in cinema supposes that, on the receiving end, the reader is more or less free to interpret the message, and an “impersonal” ethics would be measured according to the type of invitation that the spectator receives from the film. This invitation manifests itself through the “content and expression planes,” which are considered here in connection with directivity. The correlation of these planes is considered in its variable tensivity: since it is more or less directive on the content and expression planes, the filmic text is more or less “programmatic” or “thematic,” more or less “enunciative” or “enuncive.” The type of relation that the sender and the text maintain with the receiver is thus defined, as well as, consequently, the ethical aspect of the filmic communication process.

The Centro Editor de América Latina began its activities in response to the violent intervention of the dictatorship of Juan Carlos Onganía at the University of Buenos Aires, in 1966. It survived the military junta of Jorge Rafael Videla and closed its doors during the neoliberal turn in 1995. The first print runs did not fall below 20,000 copies and, according to the materials seized during the last military dictatorship, the confiscated volumes numbered up to 3,000,000 copies per title. Recognizing in the archive that the Mariano Moreno National Library began to build in 2006 the marks and traces of the publisher and their meaning allows us to evoke, through an operation of re-enunciation, the symptoms of the memory of the dictatorships that devastated the second half of the 20th century in the entire Latin American region. The construction and circulation of the Latin American Editor Center archive is understood as a practice, that is, as an operation to transform editorial knowledge, technologies, and policies that enunciate and perform on a diaphanous present for the publishing industry in Argentina. The materials that make up the archive of the Centro Editor of Latin America, the present ones—the documents on the constitution and judicial persecution of the company, the correspondence of the workers, the printing plates, the color proofs, the interviews, the design of the collections, and the newspaper articles, and the absentees: the disappearances of the workers and the deposit burned in 1980 under the subversion judgment—have offered resistance to the practice carried out by the National Library, forcing it to fill the gaps in knowledge and to develop enunciation in a manner befitting the present: curatorships and montages of exhibitions on the good praxis of the editorial are accompanied by interventions in the urban environment. The practices—theoretical, material, and political—which re-enunciate about the Centro Editor of Latin America are practices that make memory and that seek to build denunciations that resist historical revisionism and denialism regarding the responsibilities and crimes of the military junta, even today, in court. The archive of the Centro Editor of Latin America, in this sense, is not only the enunciation of that memory of destruction which it tries to remember but, above all, an action with its own syntax that can act on an editorial and collective present.

This essay develops a comprehensive approach to the study of parallax effects in early modern images, with critical emphasis on painting. Parallax is the apparent displacement of an object relative to a given background, as caused by the movement of the observer. In the cosmological debate that accompanied the Copernican revolution, the apparent absence of stellar parallax was taken as decisive evidence against the hypothesis of the motion of the Earth. Surprisingly, the emergence of a parallax view in the early modern arts has not been considered in relation to this crucial scientific debate, and it is still largely understudied. In this context, this essay puts forward a twofold argument: first, it contends that the debate on stellar parallax informs, integrates, and transforms the theory of perspective in the late Renaissance; second, it argues that the parallax view sheds new light on the representation of movement in the Baroque visual culture. The semiotic model of uttered enunciation provides a methodological framework to study the inscription of a moving observer in images, and the question of the semiotic nature of mirrors finds here a new pertinence. This framework is developed with a focus on Giordano Bruno’s art of memory, where the parallax view enables a semiotic embrace of the movement of images. In painting, analysis focuses on Caravaggio’s Narcissus, where the observer is displaced to reflect the point of view of an image that appears motionless but sees itself as a moving image.

The article aims to test a semio-rhetoric approach to archives, whose long-term objectives are: 1) to examine the evolution of audiovisual languages in the era of digital archives; 2) to develop tools for computer analysis and strategies for the enhancement of archives. Within this contribution, the central question will be the construction of its epistemological foundation, based on the relationship between the technical and the semiotic dimensions of visual archives and languages. Starting with a reading of the theory of enunciation, we will discuss two conceptions of the technical formats of images: the media formats that have accompanied the evolution and diversification of production technologies, as well as the computer formats that manage the coding, conversion, and visualization of data. By analysing these two conceptions, we will provide an overview of their interrelationships, as well as a review of the rhetorical strategies pertaining to them.

What connection can we establish between musical action and its visual representation through the notation of musical works upon various media? Based on the notion of the score as a medium, we present in this paper a part of our research on the analysis of musical graphics in use from the 60s onwards. Our main objective is to apprehend some aesthetic propositions in contemporary and experimental music by integrating its relations to the issues of notation. We will try to highlight the interest of a semiotic analysis, notably in its tensive aspects, in order to include the perceptive relations, and will consider the matter of enunciative and intermedial relations in this type of structure-process. The question of the integration of the performative aspects of the music scene, broadening with the evolution of musical language, will be discussed in addition to their relation to the meanings assigned to the notation having accompanied it over the last 50 years. In counterpoint to this, we will draw a parallel with the notions of non-activity and of event in experimental music but also in the history of art through some examples from the works of Sylvano Bussotti as well as John Cage’s Variations III-VIII.

Over the last few decades, various writing systems for sign languages (SLs) have been developed in a context where vocal languages (VLs) obviously prevail. In fact, VLs are characterized by a switch of modality between writing and speaking, while SLs present a brand new situation with the possibility of sharing modalities. Indeed, in the act of speaking and writing, SLs use similar modalities (upper body limbs movement) and reception (vision). This unprecedented situation of shared visuo-gestural modalities allows writing and speaking to meet in a form of cohabitation, sharing semiotic features. Scripturality may emerge from the formal (highly graphical in many situations) and gestural dimensions that are inherent to oral expression in SLs. The goal of this article is to establish an approach that links visuo-gestual modalities. On one hand, this approach is founded in ‘orality,’ i.e., in gesture; on the other hand, this approach is rooted in the act of drawing (tracing) as a link between language and writing. Similarly to the way SLs are able to assign meaning to movements, the meaning represented in the marks intended to be read can be back-traced to the body in action. To consider the scriptural experience in this way resonates with the cognitive theory of enaction (Varela et al., 1991) and, more broadly, with the hypotheses of embodied cognition.First we will present the three main notation systems that are used—almost exclusively—among researchers in linguistics studies of SLs. We will discuss their specific characteristics: the visual principles on which they are built in regard to their legibility, and also their ability to be written and used (focusing on the principle of linearity found in other writing systems). In the second part, we will explore in detail some issues of writing SLs such as: how can we articulate the modalities of the act of writing with the semiotic modalities of language itself? What are the analogies available to build a glyphic system? Can the act of tracing and the trace itself boost new semiotic relations in the writing of SLs? In the third part, we will look at some theoretical aspects of existing writing systems and put them into the perspective of the writing of SLs. Finally, this matter will be dealt with through the presentation of Typannot, a notation system on which we are currently working. We will focus on describing the graphematic and typographic principles of this new system. Several conceptual levels are envisioned in order to justify the coupling between technical aspects and writing/tracing activity, with the goal of obtaining a system aimed at: readability, modularity, writability and searchability. These criteria are an attempt to translate concepts of writing systems in VLs for specific issues related to the visual and gestural modalities of SLs.

The paper proposes to grasp handwritten signature as a metaphysical invention of the so-called “Western” civilization, where the signature is supposed to make possible juridical identification of the person who wrote it. However, despite this expectation of reliability, the Western handwritten signature is an aporetic sign, which is considered to be authentic (unrepeatable) and conventional (repeatable) at the same time. Because the signature is a sign of juridical identification and its authenticity can always be forged, Jacques Derrida tries to deconstruct the contradictory functioning of Western metaphysics, which leads to confusion in our expectations of authenticity and identity in our uses of signatures. By proposing a new reading of Derridean texts concerning writing, the paper focuses on the pragmatical paradox that grounds our contradictory legal politics of signing: because the exact manual reproduction of a line is impossible, no one can satisfy the legislative obligation to sign conformably to the model signature. That’s the aporia of trace’s recognition, which establishes the signature as a sign: on the one hand, the signature is supposed to represent the juridical identity of the person who traced it; on the other hand, the signature, which constantly changes its graphical form, makes every certain identification impossible. In order to question the juridical identity traditionally guaranteed by the signature, this paper invites to grasp the legal practice of signing as a subversive performativity, which is produced during the passage between recognition of juridical identity requested by the law and its simultaneous and inevitable transgression. Finally, the paper proposes a new approach to the signature as a visual performance of the self, based on a reevaluation of the altercation between Jacques Derrida and John Searle concerning the iterative character of traces and performatives.

Although the first reflections on photography were limited to defining the essence of the medium as well as its discursive aspect, the semiotic approach gradually became more interested in the uses of the photographic image and its function in social and cultural practices. Following the evolution of the semiotic methodology, this paper focus on the experience of the body and on intersubjectivity (enunciation theory) as levels of relevance between a semiotic of text and a semiotic of practices. Thus, the photographic medium can be considered as an intermediary level between the organisation of the “text-uttered” in the image, and the experience of a “photographic object” containing and presenting this image. By relating these different theoretical and methodological elements to the case of archives, this paper emphasises that researches on enunciation, object and support shed new light on a more specific question, that is the analysis of photographic archives. Acknowledging the historical and documentary significance of this type of archive, semiotics can elucidate the communication and discursive purposes of photographic archiving in a media environment which is currently undergoing technological transformation.

Usually associated with notions such as deviation, relevance, or salience, the trope is often described as simultaneously singular and ordinary. In order to invalidate this paradox, our contribution further analyzes the operations which enable the emergence of trope. We propose to replace the notion of deviation with a multi-levelled interface formalization which makes it possible to describe the tropical process in such a way that it can be intergrated in a modeling of the semiosis. The theoretical basis of the model is the concept of epilinguistic subjectivity, of which we propose a dynamic and retroactive conceptualization correlated to a formalization.

Going beyond the convergent nature of the definitions of paradigm, the present paper re-examines a number of problems related to the operation of substitution, to its relationships to commutation and, more generally, to the notion of “associative relationships”. The article stresses the overevaluation of morphological and lexicological criteria and a substitutability which varies according to functional criteria, genres and discourse situations, and this before considering when and to whom the concept of paradigm makes sense. The paper then proposes a digression through the epistemological critique of the notion of scientific paradigm; it thus shows that this critique encourages the research for blind spots in Saussure’s approach to paradigm in respect to the shifting from the “langue” (language as a system) to the “parole” (language in use) in texts, discourses within genres or situations which take into account the global dimension of meaning and argue that associative relationships are not conceived only according to the stock of words in our memory but are also created in the text. Finally, based on the interwoven analysis of the paradigm with that of the enunciation and of the point of view, the paper tries to illustrate this new approach of the duality paradigm/syntagm with a view to the accumulations of significations and continuums.The author puts forward the following words: paradigm, paradigmatisation, substitution, commutation, enunciation, point of view.

This article discusses the role of paradigms in order to precise theirs contributions to the structured management of meaning. The first step to pursue this goal is the integration of the different conceptions historically produced about paradigmatic organization of languages: inflections, derivations, designations and distribution of emphasis (along the strategic anaphorization process). There is a competition between different paradigmatic logics that elicit a series of linguistic tensions, pressures and influences that are not resolved into the definitive syntagmatic construction of discourse. In fact, a textual configuration goes with an environment of resonances that solicit an exploratory attitude from the interpreter.

Focusing not only on the levels of morpheme and lexie, but also on those of text and discourse, this article adopts, in the main, the theoretical framework of the semiotics of enunciation. It aims at specifying the role that paradigms play in the dynamics of textual and discursive construction processes. It therefore pays attention to the modelling impact of the paradigm as well as to the internal process of paradigmatization, which allows the emergence of discursive paradigms. Thus, this article not only seeks to question the principle of rationality that underlies the decision to put forward the paradigm, but also to capture a dynamics. On the one hand, it is important to go beyond a static view of the paradigm and to take into account the idea of continuity and the idea of the graduality of oppositions. On the other hand, it is a question of how the paradigm may integrate the products of usage (enonciative praxis). As far as the paradigmatization process is concerned, it is approached from the perspective of reformulation.The author puts forward the following words : dynamics, graduality, enunciation, modelling, paradigmatization, discursive paradigm.

Aristotle said that “the soul does not think without an image”; the image is a mediator between the physical world and thought. If we look at the Greek word theoria, we note that it is thought that stems from the contemplation of images. So thought and image have close links to each other.In this article, we consider these links by studying sketches made by designers during strategic thinking and demonstration as part of their preparatory work. As a medium for thought, the sketch is based not on a mimetic relation to the object but on a structural and mereological relation that leads to this twofold question: does the picture reflect the intersubjective relationship that the subject has with the object of knowledge or with the knowledge itself? The efficiency of the practice of knowledge is essentially based on the demonstration that constitutes the plane of immanence. Indeed, outside of this situation of enunciation, the explicative functions of the sketch can be ineffective. In this way, the image involves a specific perceptive relationship between a knowing subject and an object of knowledge in a communicational and participative way. What there is to be learnt is not what the image shows but what it gives us to experiment with. If the image is an object of knowledge, this is because it allows the enunciator to show that he/she is showing.In this article we identify the status of the image both in the semiosical process and in the genesis of knowledge. We first set the semiosical center of gravity of the sketch, which is not in its horizon (Bordron) but in the effectuation of its expression plan (between writing-image and image-event), and then show how the sketch calls up the current and previous experiments and perceptions in a “constellation” trend (Benjamin) and involves a diagrammatic adjustment (Peirce) between the object of knowledge and its (re)presentation mode.

This essay discusses the role played by melodic primitives in semiosis. Any melodic sound must be determined by pitch, duration, intensity and timbre, which are the minimal categories found in music. We propose an analysis of those primitives from two different points of view. In the first part of the article, we compare the role played by primitives in music and in language, as the phonological system of natural languages is also organized as a structure of minimal features. This comparison led us to understand some basic differences between music and language: melodic primitives present three characteristics that are absent from phonological primitives: grading, context-sensitivity and tensiveness. The second part of the article discusses the physics behind timbre, showing why it is not a distinctive category; rather it plays the role of a connotator (Hjelmslev). We conclude the essay by proposing that melodic features should be split into two overarching classes. The first one comprises the distinctive categories, namely pitch, duration and intensity, which are responsible for building up melodic utterances. The second class comprises just one element, timbre, which is responsible for building up the enunciation behind any melodic utterance. In the final section we advance a discussion that shows how this approach has shed light on the different ways meaning takes shape in music and language.

The present article re-examines the more general issue of the relationships between storytelling and knowledge positing that knowledge is relative, dependant on situations, on the choice of theoretical frameworks, on hypotheses and on factors taken into account. This assumption has a wide epistemological significance and it equally concerns narrations relating specific stories through the lens of singular characters. We shall confirm this by using the notions of empathy and empathic mobility (1) as well as the linguistic concepts of point of view (POV) and confronted points of view which try to define objects by taking into consideration the fundamental dialogism of language (2). On this basis, the article analyses several examples of POV in internal focalisation in stories and shows how these POV, though partial, are nevertheless capable of illustrating the complexity of the world through the referentiation of objects of discourse which indicates a capacity for reflexivity due to the fact that characters are likely to de-center themselves, to enter someone else’s mind (3). The article argues that these POV, though limited and highly subjective, escape a generalized relativism as the confrontation of PDV can reveal truths that are, indeed, related to the POV considered but that can complement each other as to reveal truths intersubjectively shared (4). This relativity has little connection with relativism ; relativity refers to the fact that reality is complex, multifaceted and cannot be defined by one theory, one notional framework, one observer/experiencer, but rather by the speakers’/participants’ aptitude to change their POV by putting themselves in somebody else’s shoes or by contemplating new perspectives on objects (in a spatiotemporal or notional sense). Although this empathic mode of knowledge is typical of empathic narrations, it is not restricted neither to stories nor to narratology as it is based on a more general enunciative substrate. The genuine cognitive implications of fictions are inseparable from the epistemic implications of enunciation, if we acknowledge the dialogical and praxeological dimension of enunciation ; this dimension is based on the speakers’ capacity of (inter)acting while putting themselves in someone else’s shoes (thus exercising empathy) and changing their points of view (thus exercising empathic mobility), with the purpose of confronting the points of view in order to better reflect — in and by language, in and by enunciation — on their relationship to events, emotions and knowledge which are all the more rich and complex as they depend on the place and the perspective adopted by speakers.

This article focuses on how and if the concept of “metalanguage” can be transferred from verbal language to image. This questioning suggests that there is indeed such a thing as a fairly stable iconic code, while it is commonly accepted that this image conceals that very codifying dimension governing its production when its main purpose is more figurative and transitive than reflexive. It is also commonly agreed that each work of art renews and most of the time transgresses the usual representation modes that tradition has established as conventions and rules. If both content and expression are taken into account and consensus built upon them, paradigms of plastic categories can be highlighted. The image is thus revealed as a codified language the actualization of which rests upon choices relevant to its own constitutive system. The contrastive confrontation of two paintings or of two motives within the same work of art discloses differences of plastic as well as formal treatment articulated around a common theme. A contrario, it can show the same formal treatment for two different semantic inputs. Such a confrontation has the effect of sharpening one’s gaze by uncovering the existence of an underlying code associating both content and expression. Such disclosure leads the observer to adopt a metadiscursive attitude as well as a meta-iconic approach that prompt the emergence of the aesthetic moment, i.e. the encounter between the observer ant the painter as it is being enunciated.

« Reflexivity » is a core notion for all disciplines in the humanities, although it is treated in a myriad of approaches, and even of denominations. This two-part study aims at showing, first, that a general issue of reflexivity exists and is essential for explaining « meaning facts » ; second, that a certain amount of distinctions have to be drawn between reflexive phenomena. The study thus proposes a frame that is both unitary and differentiated, which allows discussing several approaches: from linguistics to philosophy of language, semiotics, sociology, aesthetics, literature, film, and art studies, through which it explores notions such as meaning, representation, enonciation, behaviour, and pictures. Critical insight is given on, amongst other things, the theories of « metalanguages » or « metadiscourse » and figural approaches, as well as on improper stress on marks of enonciation and on the notion of self-reflexivity.

The Semiotics and Meaning Studies Program (SeS) is dedicated to the teaching, dissemination and generation of semiotic knowledge. Each of these activities has been driven by the firm conviction that semiotics is a discipline that occupies an important place in the various scientific and academic fields in which meaning is present and where speech is articulated. The semiotics that SeS develops has a series of components inherent in its university and cultural anchorage, characteristics which have modeled and distinguished, in some way, the current work and those that plan future actions.What does it mean when one advertises itself as a Semiotics and Meaning Studies Program? What semiotics are we talking about when there are several and when even within the perspectives that are most outstanding and represented by the most recognized researchers, there are also internal currents, specific semiotic theories that are waded through in the general theory? The following text will try to answer these questions through the recount that has been done to respond to the Signata call for papers.

This article aims to describe the possible links between semiotics and philosophy under two complementary aspects. First, it presents what semiotics, as a method of analysis, was able to bring to the analysis of philosophic texts. It then tries to show what semiotics, as a theory, can elaborate when it takes under consideration the classic problems of philosophy, in particular those of perception and consciousness.Philosophers generally try to make a theory off their own discursive practice, which means that the analysis of philosophic texts must be able to explain their particular status of « constituent speeches », i.e. the speeches which, while explaining their doctrinal contents, evaluate the conditions of their statement. This speculative dimension cannot be explained only by the logic binding the propositions to each other, but has to mobilize theoretical resources that were more particularly elaborated by Semiotics and which concern the specific iconic dimension in the act of thinking. The present article, after having reconsidered the question of statement and its complex relationship with enunciation, gives an example of analysis of a philosophic text by using the resources of actantial grammar and of the works of Lévi-Strauss, especially his formulation of the myth.In close relation to the analysis proposed, the second part of the article explains some ideas on the way we could deal with the problem of consciousness as a semiotic fact. Since any consideration on consciousness requires a definition of what is to be understood by such concept, we undertake a discussion with some classic authors as Bergson, D. Chalmers, Sartre, A. Gurwitsch on the exact point which is going to allow us to distinguish this particular state of the mind. This part of the article can be seen as a suite to the contribution of the author to the previous issue of Signata.

The aim of this essay is to show how a combined approach involving the fields of semiotics and linguistics can add to current debates on the question of enunciation. Drawing on some of the major works published in the fields of linguistics and semiotics over the past ten years, we will address the topics of deixis, enunciative responsibility, as well as reported and represented speech, dialogism and polyphony. Finally, we will show how contemporary thought on linguistic practices, style and figuration may benefit from this confrontation of points of view.

In this paper, we propose a semiotic study on generative artificial intelligences, considering the work of Midjourney and DALL·E, that are computational devices capable of producing original images on the basis of the training they have received on large databases of visual, verbal and multimodal documents. The aim is to frame their functioning from a semiotic point of view and to describe the operations that can be performed during image composition, through the options available on the two platforms. To achieve this objective, the paper will be developed into three main parts. In the first part, we will provide a general contextualisation of the relationship between semiotics and artificial intelligence, in the broad sense. Starting from Pierluigi Basso Fossali’s (2017) assumptions about a semiotic perspective understood as the study of the social organization of meaning, AIs reconfigure the thresholds between the four dimensions he defined (perception, enunciation, communication and transmission). By considering the transmission and perceptual dimension, we will define the phases of the database construction and AI model training as pertaining to an archival (distributed) perception. In the second part, we will deal with the dimension of enunciation. On the one hand, we will describe the functioning of the diffusion models guided by human prompts. On the other hand, we will show the limits and potential of these AIs, through a discussion of the operable commands and the results obtained, in light of the experiments we have carried out over the past months (August 2023-May 2024). In particular, we will test how generative AIs produce images on the basis of prompts containing the styles of specific artists, how they fuse different styles together, and how they work on visual stereotypes. In the third part of the paper, we will focus on the relationship between verbal description and visual generation in order to provide, in accordance with the perspective of the intersemiotic translation, a new research object and a new methodology.

This paper aims to propose some suggestions on what role semiotic analysis of the visual can take in the postmediality environment. Taking a case study from the field of scientific research on biodiversity, that is, the INaturalist platform, what we wish to highlight is how, with the development of digital technologies and the proliferation of new practices of use related to visuality, the landscape of media has changed to such an extent that the need to revise certain semiotic categories developed from the principle of textual closure has become evident. Algorithms, datasets and computer vision technologies include images within complex and heterogeneous configurations in the realm of enunciation, which call for different planes of immanence beyond textuality that become particularly clear from the perspective of a material turn. Considered within the materiality of its substrate, a text becomes an object, and as an object it is included in a network of possible practices of use: scientific research represents in this sense a very accurate context for observing how digital visual texts, even in their apparent immateriality, display the process through which we do things with images.